http://www.statecraft.org/chapter17.html
Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990
Watching the Neighbors: Low- Intensity Conflict in Central America
Terrorism and Aid to the Political Police
The outrage over the Beirut bombing of October 1983 prompted both the invasion of Grenada and the proliferation of U.S. covert counterterror operations. One of the provisions of the 1983 Anti-Terrorism Act was the renewal of overt police assistance. The object of the new legislation, unlike the stared objective of earlier programs, was explicitly political in nature: the violence to be opposed was political violence, political terrorism. For the first time, Congress approved a program explicitly aimed at better political policing overseas—responding to the popular sentiment against international terrorism that was fueled by the Reagan administration.
The Reagan administration's renewal of major police assistance programs to counterinsurgency states began even before changes in the law were pushed through the way was opened tor the U.S. military to provide police assistance on a large scale simply by stressing the paramilitary nature of the police to be assisted and by redefining their primary tasks as essentially military in nature. The militarization of the Third World police, which had been a concealed consequence of U.S. assistance in the 1960s, was in the 1980s turned into a virtue: their militarized status made it possible to provide aid denied thus far to those forces stuck in the mold of the civil police tradition.
A series of legislative initiatives facilitated the administration's broader objective: renewing an assistance program that could openly deal with nonmilitary police and intelligence agencies. At the top of the bill were initiatives promoted as part of the campaign against terrorism. The Anti- Terrorism Assistance Program (ATA) was approved by Congress in November 1983, its stated objective to enhance, through training and equipment, the ability of the law enforcement personnel of friendly foreign governments to deter and counter terrorism, with an emphasis on bomb detection and disposal, management of hostage situations physical security, and other matters relating to the detection, deterrence and prevention of acts of terrorism, the resolution of terrorist incidents and the apprehension of those involved in such acts."1 The initial appropriations were modest, a mere $5 million for each of the two subsequent fiscal years; this would be nearly doubled, to $9.8 million a year later.2 The increase was justified as a provision to improve airport security (a precaution about which no one could complain) and, for the first time, to permit the provision of certain commodities from the munitions list of military and police supplies requiring export clearance from the Department of Commerce.3
Considerable efforts were made by congressional human rights watchdogs in the 1980s to prevent an across-the- board revival of the defunct Public Safety program, wrapped in the flag of antiterrorism. Congress was to be notified in advance of countries programmed for assistance; respect for human rights was to be a factor in their eligibility and annual reporting On program activity was required.4 The act also limited overseas training by U.S. government personnel to no more than thirty consecutive days—apparently to prevent the repetition of the earlier cozy relationship of Public Safety's in- country advisers with foreign political police. Despite this, the ATA program appears to have been intended to maximize the opportunities to exert an influence very similar to that of its predecessor.
The act required that training be provided almost exclusively in the United States, and it set out a three- stage program. Top security officers were first to attend a two-week seminar and visit a range of U. S. security agencies, from FBI to TEA and municipal police departments. A U.S. delegation was then to visit overseas counterparts and thrash out a detailed program. And, finally, foreign officers would begin training at establishments in the United States. Unlike Public Safety, when all began their instruction at Washington's International Police Academy (IPA), training would be provided by several agencies in many different places—a procedure that might reduce the clubbishness among participants but could also make monitoring the program more difficult.5 Within two years, Congress had been notified of the intention to develop programs with 70 countries and that 1,456 foreign officers had received training in the United States.6
A companion to ATA cloaked police assistance in another program designed to improve the administration of justice overseas. The legislative foundation for a program to assist the Administration of Justice (AOJ) was laid in 1985, with an addition to the Foreign Assistance Act. Section 534, which was limited to Latin America and the Caribbean, emphasized the provision of training and material assistance for the court systems and legal profession and the "revision and modernization of legal codes and procedures."7 It opened another door to police assistance by authorizing, "notwithstanding section 660 of this Act, programs to enhance investigative capabilities, conducted under judicial or prosecutorial control."8
The new legislation authorized the allocation to the program of up to $20 million yearly until September 1987. The police assistance aspect of the program was set apart as the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), with some 10 percent of the overall funding.9 The program was defended by the administration as a necessary corollary to the work with lawyers, laws, and the courts. A State Department letter to Congress claimed: "Helping Central American governments improve their courts . . . will not have full impact on criminal justice if the courts are not presented with well-developed cases by police investigators." The rule of law would suffer "no matter how much the courts may improve" so long as police investigators lacked training in "basic investigative skills."10
Congress attempted to prevent the use of AOJ funds to train political police in the kind of investigative skills that had brought the Public Safety program into disrepute—such as torture—by adding a rider specifying that funds would only be used to improve police capabilities where investigations were "conducted under judicial or prosecutorial control. " The intention was to foster court- directed judicial police, without backing either the enforcement side of policing or the monitoring of civilians, that is, "intelligence. " The matter of police eligibility for assistance rapidly became a bone of contention when the administration's classification of foreign police forces falling under "judicial or prosecutorial control" proved to be arbitrary. The administration AOJ training for Salvadoran National Guard investigation officers to irate congressmen by claiming, apparently with a straight face, that the Guard was actually under the control of the courts.11 Congressional aides knew better: The National Guard was (and is) technically a part of the Salvadoran army
At its inception the legislation seemed to have the potential to do some good— a sensitive program to reinforce the very fabric of the legal system might have made some contribution to making the rule of law a reality. The Judiciary working in conflict situations often lack even the most basic of resources, from office furniture and photocopiers to the vehicles required to make on-the- spot inspections. Antiquated legal procedures, too, may well be improved by a concerted effort to review and reform them. Higher wages, improved infrastructure, better training and improved procedures, however, could hardly by themselves make the Judiciary independent, particularly in a state dominated by military institutions committed to circumventing the law in order to crush insurgency.
The conundrum of assistance for the administration of justice in counterinsurgency states revolves around the fiction that counterterror atrocities against subversives and suspected subversives are somehow aberrations distinct from the "lawful" counterinsurgent program Catching up with mysterious "death squads," then, could be presented as a problem for ordinary crime control (and aid to this end sold to Congress and public opinion as a signal of human rights awareness). The essential premise is that human rights abuse is a somehow natural phenomenon: a consequence of private initiative, personal pathology, ignorance, or accident. Counterinsurgent terror on a large scale is, however, rarely the work of either renegades or civilian psychopaths; indeed solitaries and off-base auxiliaries who go freelance, and against the grain of policy, are themselves promptly dealt with, extralegally, by the counterinsurgent apparatus.
Another rationale for assistance in the administration of justice was that the terror tactics of the security services are a natural response to the incompetence (or betrayal) of the courts. A long- standing argument was made that the failure of courts to hold, prosecute, and convict suspected subversives poses insuperable obstacles to the counterinsurgent. In the context of the counterinsurgency state, criticism of the weak judiciary in the 1960s, as in the 198Os, was presented as a prime impetus behind counter/error: a terrible, swift sword cutting through the dithering and corruption of the courts to bring instant justice. A 1967 Public Safety report, for example, suggested that the Guatemalan army "bypassed the courts," summarily executing "suspected guerrillas and supporters,'' because they could have no confidence in justice being done otherwise: 'Guatemalan Army officers significantly remark that the first suspects captured were turned over to the courts but. . . obtained their freedom.' This, they said, was "bad for their forces' morale." Counterterror was the solution to the morale problem: "Thereafter the number of guerrillas turned over to the courts seemed to diminish somewhat."12
Similarly, a 1965 Pentagon study on relations with Latin American armies reflected the notion that the law itself, let alone the courts, was among the main "handicaps" to counterinsurgency. The civilians, it suggested, returned the guerrillas to the street moments after the soldiers rounded them up: "[Many. . . legal systems require courts to free prisoners, even notorious guerrillas . . . unless witnesses can testify they actually saw the accused commit the crime."13 Counterterror posed a shortcut solution to that problem; a better legal system could develop in its own good time.
Ironically, the argument of judicial incompetence would also be made in the 1980s to explain the impunity of counterterrorists before the law. One of the recurring issues in the debate on human rights in El Salvador and Guatemala, for example, is whether police and military personnel can be brought to book if the judiciary is too frightened or corrupt to act. The answer proposed is more U.S. assistance—for the police and military, to train them to be better citizens and professional counterinsurgents, and for the judicial establishment, to teach judges, prosecutors, and investigators essential skills, and how to resist blandishments and intimidation. All well and good— except for the problem of the institutional doctrine and policy behind counter/error <snip>